Nymspace is a pseudonym-based chat app built by the Berkman Center. Nymspace is organized into two repos:

• nymspace_server - a node.js/express/socket.io/mongodb/mongoose chat server
• nymspace_client - a vue.js application that consumes the server APIs and presents a chat application to participants.

This third repo contains documentation for self-hosting and deploying nymspace frontend and backend to a production environment.

We provide a single file deployment with docker compose in docker-compose.yml.

• Create an .env file based on .env.example
• edit the env variables and replace things like example.com with your domain
• Deploy the compose file with your favorite docker management tool
• Configure a proxy server

We provide a sample nginx file in nymspace.conf.

If you're using a tool like nginx proxy manager, you can:

• Add a main entry pointing your domain to the ip address of your container host
• Point to port 8080 or whichever port you set in the docker-compose
• Enable websocket support
• Add these locations to your proxy host:
  • Location: /v1/ → Forward to nymspace-backend:3000
  • Location: /socket.io/ → Forward to nymspace-backend:5555

• Update, upgrade and lockdown your server
• Install node and yarn using your favorite package manager or tool manager (we like [https://volta.sh])
• Install PM2 globally
• Install mongodb (ubuntu 24 server)
• Pull the latest code from github.com/berkmancenter/nymspace_server
• Create a production env file based on .env.example
• Copy the code to the server e.g.

git clone [email protected]:berkmancenter/nymspace_server.git
cp nymspace_server/.env.example cp nymspace_server/.env
rsync -avx ./nymspace_server/ [email protected]:nymspace_server

• ssh into your server, cd into the repo, and yarn start, e.g.

ssh [email protected]
cd ~/nymspace_server && yarn start

• Pull the latest code from github.com/berkmancenter/nymspace_client
• Update create an .env.local that looks like this (replacing example.com with your target production domain):

VITE_API_VERSION=v1
VITE_API_SERVER_URL=https://example.com
VITE_WEBSOCKET_SERVER_URL=https://example.com

• Run yarn build
• Copy the built files to your webserver, e.g.

rsync -avx ./nymspace_client/dist/ [email protected]:/var/www/nymspace_client/dist

• Back on the server, install nginx
• sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf and include the template from nymspace.conf
• ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com.conf
• sudo systemctl restart nginx
• make sure that the permissions are correctly set on /var/www/nymspace_client/dist for nginx to read them
• Install and run lets encrypt to provide SSL for your domain (this will edit your nginx conf and configure ssl termination and redirects as needed)

• Make sure you built the front end with the correct urls for the backend APIs
• Make sure the backend started successfully
• Check that your proxy is properly configured for WebSocket support

• VITE_API_VERSION: API version (default: v1)
• VITE_API_SERVER_URL: Full URL to your server
• VITE_WEBSOCKET_SERVER_URL: WebSocket server URL (mostt likely the same as above)
• JWT_SECRET: Secret key for JWT tokens (make a random string)
• AUTH_TOKEN_SECRET: Secret for authentication token (make a random string)

• MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH: How long a message can be (default: 2000)
• NYMSPACE_ENABLE_AGENTS: Enable AI agents (default: false)
• NYMSPACE_ENABLE_POLLS: Enable polls feature (default: false)
• NYMSPACE_ENABLE_PUBLIC_CHANNEL_CREATION: Allow users to create public channels (default: false)

• SMTP_HOST: SMTP server hostname
• SMTP_PORT: SMTP server port
• SMTP_USERNAME: SMTP username
• SMTP_PASSWORD: SMTP password
• EMAIL_FROM: From email address

• OPENAI_API_KEY: OpenAI API key for AI features
• LANGCHAIN_API_BASE_PATH: LangChain API base path
• PERSPECTIVE_API_KEY: Google Perspective API key for content moderation